Luke Harding in Tbilisi and Ian Traynor, Europe editor

TBILISI, Georgia - Russia's punitive campaign in the Caucasus threatened to intensify into all-out war against Georgia last night, with Russian troops seizing control of strategic towns a couple of hours from the capital, and aircraft pounding Georgian infrastructure.

Vastly outnumbered by the Kremlin's ground and air forces, the Georgian government announced it was pulling back its troops to defend the capital, Tbilisi, against a feared Russian onslaught. Washington accused the Kremlin of long preparing an invasion of Georgia in "aggression that must not go unanswered".

"Russia has invaded a sovereign neighbouring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century," President George Bush said. "The Russian government must reverse the course that it appears to be on." He urged Russia to agree to a ceasefire offer by Georgia.

The Georgian authorities said the town of Gori, 40 miles north of Tbilisi, had, in effect, fallen to the Russians, who were also advancing from the breakaway province of Abkhazia in the west into territory previously under Georgian control.    ….continue reading

By Michael Falcone

KAILUA, Hawaii -- Senator Barack Obama, on vacation on the island of Oahu, emerged today to issue this statement on the situation between Russia and Georgia. He made the remarks from the palm-tree lined driveway of his vacation home here. Here is his statement as delivered:

I want to just speak briefly about the situation in Georgia. It's a situation that continues to deteriorate because of Russia's escalation of the use of military force. At this point I have spoken to President Saakashvili, and conveyed my deep regret over the loss of life, and the suffering of the people of Georgia.

For many months, I have warned that there needs to be active international engagement to peacefully address the disputes over South Ossetia and Abkhazia, including a high-level and neutral international mediator, and a genuine international peacekeeping force - not simply Russian troops.

No matter how this conflict started, Russia has escalated it well beyond the dispute over South Ossetia and has now violated the space of another country. Russia has escalated its military campaign through strategic bombing and the movement of its ground forces into the heart of Georgia. There is no possible justification for these attacks.    ….continue reading

By Michael Cooper

HARRISBURG, Pa. -- The intensifying warfare in the former Soviet republic of Georgia has put a new focus on the increasingly hard line that Senator John McCain has taken against Russia in recent years, with stances that have often gone well beyond those of the Bush administration and its focus on engagement.

Mr. McCain has called for expelling what he has called a "revanchist Russia" from meetings of the Group of 8, the organization of leading industrialized nations. He urged President Bush -- in vain -- to boycott the group's meeting in St. Petersburg in 2006.

Senator McCain on the campaign trail.

And he has often mocked the president's assertion that he got a sense of the soul of Vladimir V. Putin, who was then Russia's president and is now its prime minister, by looking into his eyes. "I looked into his eyes," Mr. McCain said, "and saw three letters: a K, a G and a B."    …..continue reading

By Helene Cooper

WASHINGTON -- Russian troops stepped up their advance into Georgian territory on Monday, attempting to turn back the clock to the days when Moscow held uncontested sway over what it considers its "near abroad," and arousing increasing alarm among Western leaders.

Even as they prepared to convene an emergency meeting of NATO on Tuesday and President Bush denounced the Russian actions in the strongest terms to date, the United States and its European allies faced tough choices over how to push back. They seemed uncertain how to adjust to a new geopolitical game that threatened to undermine two decades of democratic gains in countries that were once part of the Soviet sphere.

Russian troops briefly seized a Georgian military base and took up positions close to the Georgian city of Gori on Monday, raising Georgian fears of a full-scale invasion or an attempt to oust the country's pro-Western president, Mikheil Saakashvili.

Mr. Bush, little more than an hour after returning to Washington from the Olympic Games in Beijing, bluntly warned Russia that its military operations were damaging its reputation and were "unacceptable in the 21st century."    ….continue reading

By Brian Lawson

OSSIPEE -- A loose format allowed former U.S. Rep. Jeb Bradley (R-Wolfeboro) and former Health and Human Services Commissioner John Stephen (R-Manchester) to participate in the fiercest debate this election cycle.

Bradley and Stephen were allowed to rebut each other and directly question one another Monday night at the debate sponsored by the Carroll County Republicans. The two touched upon issues ranging from energy to earmarks and the current situation in Georgia.

The debate got off to a quick start with an exchange over whether or not Stephen increased property taxes while at HHS. This morning Bradley held a press conference with various state representatives and county commissioners to argue that Stephen did not fully fund Medicare reimbursements for nursing homes, which resulted in counties picking-up a larger share than anticipated.    ….continue reading

By John Wildermuth

SAN FRANCISCO -- Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan qualified Friday for a November showdown with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, collecting the signatures needed to get on the ballot as an independent candidate for Congress.

"We're very excited," said Sheehan, 51, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq who is well-known for her protest outside President Bush's Texas ranch. "Now we have to get organized and regroup."

Republican Dana Walsh and Libertarian Philip Berg will join Pelosi and Sheehan on the Nov. 4 ballot.

The collection of signatures by Sheehan's campaign was more exciting than usual. On Wednesday, the campaign was well short of the 10,198 signatures needed to get on the ballot after San Francisco elections officials found that more than 40 percent of the people who signed weren't registered in the city's Eighth Congressional District.    ….continue reading

WASHINGTON--Hillary Rodham Clinton's top campaign strategist advised her to cast presidential rival Barack Obama as having questionable "roots to basic American values and culture" and use the theme to counter the image that his background is diverse and multicultural.

"I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values," Mark Penn wrote in a March 2007 memo to Clinton.

Clinton did not take Penn's advice, revealed by a report in the September issue of The Atlantic magazine.

The article says Clinton's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination went from front-runner status to failure for a number of reasons, from badly managed money to blistering warfare between advisers. Clinton, the candidate who said she was ready to lead on Day One of her administration, did little to quell the infighting.

Senator Hillary Clinton ignored advice from strategist Mark Penn during the primary to portray Barack Obama as un-American.  She's seen above campaigning for Obama in Nevada.

Clinton grew angry during a conference call with her senior aides about how to recover from her loss in the Iowa caucuses. She found herself doing most of the post-mortem, to near-silence on the other end of the line.

"This has been a very instructive call, talking to myself," Clinton snapped, and hung up, the magazine reported.    ….continue reading

By Ellen Nakashima

Several Internet and broadband companies have acknowledged using targeted-advertising technology without explicitly informing customers, according to letters released yesterday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

And Google, the leading online advertiser, stated that it has begun using Internet tracking technology that enables it to more precisely follow Web-surfing behavior across affiliated sites.

The revelations came in response to a bipartisan inquiry of how more than 30 Internet companies might have gathered data to target customers. Some privacy advocates and lawmakers said the disclosures help build a case for an overarching online-privacy law.

"Increasingly, there are no limits technologically as to what a company can do in terms of collecting information . . . and then selling it as a commodity to other providers," said committee member Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who created the Privacy Caucus 12 years ago. "Our responsibility is to make sure that we create a law that, regardless of the technology, includes a set of legal guarantees that consumers have with respect to their information."

Markey said he and his colleagues plan to introduce legislation next year, a sort of online-privacy Bill of Rights, that would require that consumers must opt in to the tracking of their online behavior and the collection and sharing of their personal data.

But some committee leaders cautioned that such legislation could damage the economy by preventing small companies from reaching customers. Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) said self-regulation that focuses on transparency and choice might be the best approach.    ….continue reading

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Unlike the rest of us, most U.S. corporations and foreign companies doing business in the United States pay no federal income tax, according to a new report from Congress.

The study by the Govern- ment Accountability Office, expected to be released Tuesday, said two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005, and about 68 percent of foreign companies doing business in the U.S. avoided corporate taxes over the same period.   ….continue reading